Political Scene: Obama’s Undesirable Debt-Ceiling Solution

We all knew that the economics of a government shutdown were bad and would only get worse with a failure to raise the debt ceiling. And today’s offer by John Boehner to raise the debt limit for six weeks in order to negotiate other fiscal matters doesn’t look like it will solve much of anything. One option that President Obama still has is to set aside the debt limit by executive order. “The fear in the White House is that” doing so, John Cassidy says, “would undermine the credibility of the U.S. government.… In seeking to avoid a debt crisis, you would then produce a debt crisis.”

But as Ryan Lizza says on this week’s Political Scene podcast, the gamesmanship of this fiscal-policy standoff is just as fraught. “Obama hasn’t a hundred per cent ruled out this Fourteenth Amendment option, although they’ve come pretty close to it, but they also don’t want to give Republicans any indication that they have a solution.” Hendrik Hertzberg says, “There could come a point when it may be a bad idea, but less bad than all the other ideas.”